Top Ten Things Heartland Institute Will Do With $6.4 Million in Funding

I couldn’t think of a way to easily excerpt this excellent piece of satire, so I’ll just repost it with apologies in advance and ask WUWT readers to go to wendymcelroy.com and give her props. -Anthony

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My hat is off to the commenter at Watts Up With That who first dubbed the faked Heartland memo “The Protocols of the Elders of Heartland.” That quip says it all, really.

The second-best quip about the phony memo come from Megan McArdle at the Atlantic: “Basically, it reads like it was written from the secret villain lair in a Batman comic. By an intern.”

But, thinking of secret protocols and secret villain lairs made me wonder, what could this mysterious and elusive “institute” be doing with their anonymous funding? So I’m pleased to leak my very own Heartland strategy memo:

Top Ten Things Heartland Institute Will Do With $6.4 Million in Funding

10. Build a secret oil-powerednuclear-powered coal-powered lair on a South Pacific Island.
9. Arrange Arctic polar-bear hunting expeditions for wealthy contributors. With bazookas for top donors.
8. Train an armada of millions of kamikaze pigeons to fly into wind turbines, gumming up the works.
7. Replace Mitt Romney with a remote-controlled animatronic robot. Oh wait, that’s been done.
6. Exploit our Microsoft connection to install mind-controlling stroboscopic subliminal video messages in Windows Phone 7. People do use Windows Phone 7, don’t they?
5. Create the “Happy Children Fund” to provide subsidized tobacco products to pre-teens. Better yet, put it in their school lunches.
4. Genetically engineer a breed of SuperFlatulenttm cattle to emit a Gaia-destroying flood of methane into the atmosphere.
3. Re-train the armada of pigeons to defecate on solar panels. Maybe do this before #8.
2. Hijack a nuclear warhead and hold the world to ransom for one million dollars!
1. Send an obviously faked-up memo to DeSmogBlog to make them look ridiculous. Oh wait…

11. Start a Recovery Center for recovering Climatologists to help them deal with the pangs of withdrawal from a decade of Fame & Funding as they revert back to being no-name professors in unheard of backwater universities and government labs.

12. Start a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that will allow the legions of “scientists” who preferred fame and funding over proper scientific process that resulted in $$$Hundreds of $$$Billions of taxpayer’s dollars to be diverted from useful programs like Public Health and Education into utterly useless and futile Eco-Friendly Greenie Gaia Saving programs, to come clean and apologize to society.

11. Apply to Johnny Carson’s estate for the rights to dedicate the “Stinky Frostheimer” lie detector skit to climate alarmism, when and wherever appropriate, and that it be re-dubbed the “Stinky Gleickheimer” skit.

The second-best quip about the phony memo come from Megan McArdle at the Atlantic: “Basically, it reads like it was written from the secret villain lair in a Batman comic. By an intern.”
Correction: the final sentence should read: “By a henchman” supervillians, as a rule, don’t have interns. They have bungling assistants who provide some much needed comic relief at moments of great stress. Hence, this must be a henchman.

Wot, no Death Star, or laser canon on the moon?
Evil mad scientists just aren’t what they used to be.
Nowadays it seems to be evil just teaching children to be open minded and skeptical, just what kids should be……..

So let’s get this straight. You actually admitted on this blog just yesterday that you did get money through Heartland – is it the $90,000 that’s in the leaked Heartland budget or not?

And I don’t see you being straight with us either – are you actually going on the record and saying that the leaked Heartland budget is fake, or not?

[REPLY: You need to get up to speed. Anthony applied for an $88,000 grant to set up a website to present publicly available data in an easy-to-use format. The budget does not mention “$90,000”. The Climate Strategy document, from which yor reference is taken, is fake. -REP]

The “clime scientists” can be retrained to be environmental reclamation and sorting specialists—aka sanitation engineers, aka garbage men. They are already good a making garbage, they should be good at sorting it during pick up.

Are you that ignorant of this discusion? Obviously you haven’t gotten up to speed, and you are just posting baseless opinion. Let me help you “get this straight”:

Anthony was paid less than half of your “$90,000” figure so far to do work. Maybe you work for nothing, or maybe you’re a hypocrite and think that others should work for free. And everyone familiar with the fabricated memo knows it is fake, whether they admit it or not. The fake memo is the only issue, since the other information has never been a secret.

And unlike conniving, self-serving climate charlatans like Mann, Jones, and many others who take muliti-million dollars in government grants, Heartland operates on private donations.

Actually, I bet the $88k is for setting up appropriate sympathisers to stand by weather stations with fans to keep them cooler 24/7!
See, Anthony ? – the real truth of your weather stations project is now out in the open! LOL
(do I really need to put /sarc after this? Oh wait, there’s possibly someone from despicablesmogblog may read this and publish it directly!)
PS – perhaps Desmogblog should simply be hereinafter referred to as DSB? – Dozy Stupid Blog?

Infiltrate NASA and have their scientific staff start a web-site (on government paid time) to spread the impending threat of an over-heated planet on an unsuspecting public to the point where an additional $88,000 is needed to put the raw data into the hands of the public so that they can make up their own minds. Not that it would ever happen. Well not for $6.4 million.

Tom Swirley,
You are a troll, but for the benefit of others, there is no controversy over the money budgeted for Watts. The insinuation is that Heartland has been funding WUWT. Well, you have the budget, check it and you’ll see no money is allocated for WUWT. Anthony approached Heartland to help get a donor for a web service project to provide graphical representation of the NOAA database (i.e. GOVERNMENT data). The project has not even been announced yet. When you complete a project it is typical and customary to acknowlege funding at that time. Furthermore, it is in Heartlands interest to make sure there funding is announced, because you see that looks real good to potential donors, that their money is being put to good use. The only reason this is considered a controvery is because the FAKE document (as in, getting the Koch funding details entirely wrong) was labeled “Confidential” and so the FAKE document makes it look like something sneaky is going down.

Provide a grant to Tom Swirly, so he can chill out and comment with a joke…

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Anyway, did you hear the one about the group of polar bears that received a $6.4m grant to set up a green energy company ? They started with solar, but that went bust. Then they went into wind turbines and those froze up, however, eventually they realized that the best return on investment is creating a false AGW agenda to raise more funds for their false “green” agenda…

11. Add “Examples of Bad Science” module for the K-12 curriculum: Switching signs on proxy data that doesn’t match your story (i.e. upside down Tiljander) is bad science. Using poor proxies to prove a hockey stick (i.e. stripped bark trees) is bad science. Overweighting proxies that support your fantasy (i.e. the lonely ONE tree in Yamal) is bad science. Hiding late year proxy data that proves the unsuitability of the proxy is bad science (HIDE THE DECLINE BABY).

Offer the 6.4 million to Tom Cruise.
His mission, should he choose to accept it.
Find a proponent of AGW within the “TEAM” who genuinely would like his prognosis to be wrong .
This proposal will self destruct in 60 seconds.
PS
Tell him not to waste any time on Phil Jones, as he has already expressed his fervent hope that he is right, regardless of the implications to man/womankind.

10. Build a secret oil-powered nuclear-powered coal-powered whale oil-powered lair on a South Pacific Island. (Truly evil super-villains have carbon-releasing lairs powered by the cruel slaughter of sympathetic animals, which in the eyes of the radical green left is actually worse than the cruel slaughter of people – the “greenest” policy of all.)

11. Order Smithers to RELEASE THE HOUNDS! (just because)

I say this because my impression of the voice used by the forger in the strategy document sounds more like a writer for the Simpsons character, Charles Montgomery Burns.

I hope the conversation between the FBI and PG happens soon, featuring the question, “Where were you and what were you doing at 2012-02-13T12:41:52-08:00,” and “Can anyone corroborate that?” and “We have a warrant to examine your computers. They will be returned to you unchanged in a timely manner.” I am worried that the US AG may obstruct it. Heartland should try to keep it at the San Francisco district office level.

It’s Oscar season. Make up some fake gold plated little statuettes and award them every year.
Best Strawman and so on. categories: needs a brain, needs a heart, needs courage.
Also a Dorothy award for the best “We’re not in Kansas anymore” realization.
Last but not least, the Best Toto award.

Megan McArdle also writes, “I should also probably note that I disagree pretty strenuously with Heartland’s position on global warming. I not only believe that anthropogenic global warming is happening, but also support stiff carbon or source fuels taxes in order to combat it. While I’ve expressed some dismay at the behavior revealed in the leaked Climategate memos, they haven’t changed my mind about the reality, or the danger, of global warming.”

Sorry kids but however clever McArdle appears with her Batman quip she is still an idiot who only appeals to idiots. Let her run around in circles and yelp all she likes. This dog isn’t even in the race.

Mr. Watts, you are approaching this in EXACTLY the right way. We need to hold these people up for ridicule. Their positions are so completely silly, their “logic” so completely irrational, their rhetoric so completely over the top that we need to exercise at every opportunity the holding of these people up for a good laugh.

What the world needs is more climatologist and “environmentalist” jokes. I don’t mean someone who truly cares about the environment, I mean the ones who use the “environment” as a political cover to engage in economic suicide. The message from the left as a whole is always one of self-loathing. I am tiring of it. We need to make fun of them.

1) Homer Hansen – a thermometer and a one way ticket to the North Pole – then he can throw away his pink crayon.
2) Phil Jones – a can of whitewash for the next inquiry.
3) Mikey Mann – 5 years in the State Pen *
4) Kevin Trenberth – a telescope – he can use it for looking for his missing heat – while he is at it, he might search for some scientific integrity.
5) Katharine Hayhoe – a history book ( the sort that goes back before 1965).
6) Chris Huhne – a get out of jail free card – he might soon need it
7) Princess Charles – a carbon capture device for Camilla’s fags.
8) Al Gore – a snorkel and pair of goggles – for when his beachside condo is under 12 feet of water.
And finally…….
9) BBC – bugger all – you already get enough from me.

* I am advised by Messrs Sue, Grabbit and Runne to make it clear that Mikey has done nothing at all wrong and should only go to the Pen as a long term visitor!

11) Create a “Secret Confidential” memo, to be circulated to every college and university campus, wherein the members of the Team discuss their plans to ban all production of beer because of the the “evil CO2” that it emits. Should have the young “skulls full of mush” fleeing the Carbon demonization bandwagon like cockroaches when the light comes on.

11. Create a new database of climate data that is full of errors and designed to make access to the underlying data impenetrable to all but the most dedicated. Call it the “Best” temperature database ever. Oh, wait….

There are some people that have learned nothing from “FakeGate”. They are still insisting the memo is real and are calling it “HeartlandGate”. They will call it that forever. This is a big moment for them. They feel they have found something that neutralizes ClimateGate.

Here’s two comments sent in reply to me from something I posted 11 months ago on YouTube. They must feel they have new ammunition now to address old issues and set everything right—in their eyes.

These are the actual quotes from the past two days:

Internal documents from within the Heartland Institute have been leaked which prove that the HI lies to schoolchildren, threatens climate scientists, and lies to Congress.

What is not real and is entirely made up fiction is “Climategate”.

and this, in response to ClimateGate:

Bullshit. Stop making up lies. There was absolutely NOTHING to the non-climategate non-scandal. They proved NOTHING.

Heartlandgate is the REAL crime, along with﻿ Mocktongate and his lies, arson record, and tax evasion records.

I hate to be a party pooper, but the fart jokes and frat-boy jokes and ha-ha gotchas are the opposite of what used to make WUWT stand out from the pack. Every boy-in-the basement blog does this stuff. Please leave it to them.

WUWT used to be above this kind of immature gloating. Has something changed?

I don’t see this as a gotcha. There are people that are right now, as we are commenting here, pushing this “HeartlandGate” thing. They want to world to believe it is real. The truth has to be told to show they are lying.

Yes, Johanna…WUWT was named in a faked document, and it’s name is currently being dragged through the mud by numerous blogs, and media outlets which did not bother to verify their sources. A little gloating, I think, is warranted. More importantly, threads of this nature do serve to keep this issue alive until hopefully, the truth comes out, and retractions/corrections are published by the various smear merchants that are gleefully trashing the reputations of innocent people.

If I’m off base, I’ll gladly stop posting. This is Mr. Watts’ soap-box, not mine, and if he, and/or his moderators decide to stop all of this silliness, I’ll stop, without argument, or complaint. Until then, though…

So let’s get this straight. You actually admitted on this blog just yesterday that you did get money through Heartland – is it the $90,000 that’s in the leaked Heartland budget or not?

Tom, did you know that the climate scientists on the BEST project received funding from the evil Koch bros? If you read posts on WUWT you would not have hit the post button sending your comment here for ridicule. By the way what is the Sierra Club’s annual budget? You do know that the Sierra Club received $25 million from the gas industry? You do know that Stanford climate group is funded to the tune of $750 million ($75 million per annum) by BP oil and Exxon? You do know that the Climate Research Unit (CRU) has been funded, among others, by BP Shell, Nirex nuclear? And you alarmists complain about $6.5 million. You people really are greedy.

Jeff Alberts says:
February 18, 2012 at 1:05 pm
Bazookas are so passe (and hard to find any more). I’d go with Miniguns, or, if you really want the explosion with nothing left, Hellfire missiles. Fire and forget, dontcha know.
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Yep, sticky bombs appear to be the weapon of choice now.
All the more reason to drive a plastic car.

this isn’t about gloating as far as I can see. It’s about observing the ridiculousness of the situation that has been entirely created by the warmist camp – the silliness of the MSM, the crazy attitude of folk that will publish or promote anything in a blind faith – and then finding it’s a load of tosh!
It’s ironic, don’t you think?

johanna – as I am the author of the original piece which Anthony has graciously chosen to repost here, allow me to respond.

You seem to lack an appreciation of the value of satire in political debate. This tradition goes back decades, if not centuries; it has been practiced by those ranging from amateur lampoonists to H.L. Mencken. Recall that Boss Tweed didn’t fret about the editorial writers; it was the cartoonists that worried him. When something ridiculous is being promoted with great seriousness, seriousness is not always the appropriate response.

In this case, I saw a memo which clearly embodied a warmist caricature of the views of global warming skeptics (anti-climate! anti-science!), with elements of the big-oil-funded-deniers conspiracy theory. I chose to exaggerate, for comedic effect, two aspects: the apparent warmist view of what deniers “really want” (destroy Gaia!), and the apparent belief that six million dollars is an astonishingly huge sum of money to achieve their ends (hence the Austin Powers reference). It’s a “send-up” of some ridiculously silly notions, meant to highlight the fact that those notions *are* silly.

Call me immature if you like, but it’s not “gloating.” I have nothing to gloat about; I’m not in the climate-research or the think-tank business. But I do have a message, and I’m happy to see that many people here “got it.”

I don’t see this as a gotcha. There are people that are right now, as we are commenting here, pushing this “HeartlandGate” thing. They want to world to believe it is real. The truth has to be told to show they are lying.
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I agree, without equivocation, that people who promulgate lies should be taken down. But that is not what this thread is about. My concern is that a thread which invites snark and schoolboy ‘humour’ as its primary purpose on such an important issue puts WUWT down in the basement with the pimply blogger whose idea of a great night is watching movies about frat boys behaving badly with a big box of tissues at hand (so to speak).

Alternatively, WUWT is just a branch of Letterman ‘humour’.

There is lots of genuinely funny stuff on this site, in both posts and comments, and that’s great. But this one is a lapse which undermines the credibility of WUWT, IMO.

Mitt Romney is a carbon tax candidate, and has been deeply involved in carbon emissions reductions regulations and renewables agreements. A subsidiary of Bain Capital owns Styron, one of the makers of smart meters expected to be installed on homes world wide. He supports international ghg reductions agreements. Ref: political positions of Mitt Romney. Ref: Styron. Ref: No Apology p 262.

He has been running for 5 years, so many of us are not taken in by this global warming/Romneycare candidate, and can provide accurate and truthful information about his many different stands, statements, and actual policies regarding ghg regulations and energy policies.

The people pushing this doom mongering farce and their media sycophants have proven themselves immune from rational challenge for decades. They will only be successfully ferreted out of their numerous bureaucratic fiefdoms, from which they issue their growing cascade of nanny state regulations to control every aspect of the lives of everyone who is not one of them, when the instantaneous reaction to each new piece of catastrophic hyperbole they produce is not OMG!!!, but ROFLMAO!!! As long as we confine our efforts to arguing technical niceties on themes where they have, by language and construction, established all the ground rules of the dialogue, they will continue to prevail in driving us down the path to societal seppuku. Given the dismal quality of almost all the BS(Bad Science) produced around this topic over the last several decades, the proper response is and always has been, not to offer attempts at rational counterargument, but instead to apply derision and a raucous horse laugh.

These are the people who couldn’t hack the hard sciences. So they gather together (like a pack of dogs or ambos) against those who know. Revenge Against The Nerds. Herd behaviour is a well-known phenomenon, the warmists are abusing research.

johanna says (February 18, 2012 at 2:11 pm): “There is lots of genuinely funny stuff on this site, in both posts and comments, and that’s great. But this one is a lapse which undermines the credibility of WUWT, IMO.”

OMG, you’re right! The CAGW propagandists have been using Anthony’s sense of humor to undermine his credibility! If we act all sober and serious-like, they’ll have absolutely nothing to use against him! I mean, then they’d have to, you know, make stuff up, and we know they’d never do that, right? :-)

But serially, comparing Anthony and, say, James Hansen, I’d estimate their credibility is inversely proportional to their respective senses of humor. :-)

johanna: as I am the author of the original piece which Anthony has graciously chosen to repost here, allow me to respond.

You seem to lack an appreciation of the value of satire in political debate. This tradition goes back decades, if not centuries; it has been practiced by those ranging from amateur lampoonists to H.L. Mencken. Recall that Boss Tweed didn’t fret about the editorial writers; it was the cartoonists that worried him. When something ridiculous is being promoted with great seriousness, seriousness is not always the appropriate response.

In this case, I saw a memo which clearly embodied a warmist caricature of the views of global warming skeptics (anti-climate! anti-science!), with elements of the big-oil-funded-deniers conspiracy theory. I chose to exaggerate, for comedic effect, two aspects: the apparent warmist view of what deniers “really want” (destroy Gaia!), and the apparent belief that six million dollars is an astonishingly huge sum of money to achieve their ends (hence the Austin Powers reference). It’s a “send-up” of some ridiculously silly notions, meant to highlight the fact that those notions *are* silly.

Call me immature if you like, but it’s not “gloating.” I have nothing to gloat about; I’m not in the climate-research or the think-tank business. But I do have a message, and I’m happy to see that many people here “got it.”

“But this one is a lapse which undermines the credibility of WUWT, IMO.”

Well, your opinion is dead wrong. Humor is one of the most powerful weapons that can be employed to stop a nutty idea in its tracks. People hate looking ridiculous, and they will flee from the side that looks that way.

The Warmist sympathizers who engineered this fiasco for themselves hoped to fabricate evidence to carve a shortcut to that very same goal. They deserve to be pilloried and ridiculed until their ears bleed.

The Ministry would consist of Charles, Anne, George, and the Director, Wilma. When someone wants a plausible number for say, the change in temperature for a doubling of CO2, they call the Ministry and the Charles, Anne, and George kick it around a bit and come up with something like 1.5 to 3.2 Celcius degrees. If someone wants to know the rate of sea level rise, they kick that around and come up with 18 to 22 meters by 2050. Totally made up but plausible IF…

Think of the money it would save, too. We pay countless thousands of government employees to collect, shred, slice, dice, tabulate, formulate, collate, and color untold thousands of reports that nobody reads or believes anyhow. They could all be replaced by three people that just make up plausible numbers.

Frank K. says:
February 18, 2012 at 8:58 am
“Of course, $6.4 million is just a drop in the bucket compared to the BILLIONS in Climate Ca$h ™ that our climate elites get.”

They are incapable of understanding! They DEEP DOWN believe that the skeptics (sic) have unimaginable funds whilst they, the poor, misunderstood scientists, are working away in a garret on a miserly dime. After all Hansen has denied his $1.6 million (sic) “because it was paid to his grandchildren.” DO WE BELIEVE that BS !

Hey! Isn’t that Roger Glover of Deep Purple on Bass? in the Nazareth clip.

Sorry to go off topic.
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Now we are talking. You have just ‘forced’ me to dig out Deep Purple in Rock. I have resisted the CO2, the albedo, the air pressure, the shifting of the Earth on its axis, the Sunspots and mooncyles – but thanks to your post my quivering hand is ‘forced’ … aaaaah … eternal void. Time to dig out the Hawkwind albums.

Oh, and to the poster who so carefully and at such length explained the role of satire to this dumb bunny – here’s a tip. If you have to explain it, it’s not working.

The past few days have been very serious blogging. Some of us could indeed be seen as acting like ‘frat boys in the basement” in this thread. It’s party time as the threat could be analogized as ‘the attacking suicide bomber wasn’t very smart and ran back into his own ranks and exploded causing many impoding heads within his ranks’. But we are very polite. You never hear what we say when you are not present. ;>)

Certain people adopt very readily a tactic of repeating statements without regard to the truth of the matter. We have no effective means of controlling this, so it will always continue as a “tactic.”

This is just one example of millions.

And it will go on as long as the “climate debate,” or longer.

A year from now, people will still be posting the faked information, as a distraction. And it will work, because you have to respond to it or they “win,” in their minds anyway. And it derails the conversation. So they will keep doing it.

Because it works, and there’s no real downside to lying. Credibility isn’t really relevant anymore.

Are you that ignorant of this discusion? Obviously you haven’t gotten up to speed, and you are just posting baseless opinion. Let me help you “get this straight”:

Anthony was paid less than half of your “$90,000″ figure so far to do work.

As JamesD points out, Anthony has to date been paid bupkis. There is a proposed budget, half of which has been covered by an anonymous donor, but the full amount has not yet been raised, and the project is not yet approved, much less under way.

I think we should cut johanna some slack. Fart jokes, like the 3 Stooges, as something just about every male understands as basic to what is funny and which just about every female shakes their head about and wonders when we will grow up.

I think the women may be right on this, but will continue to laugh at both fart jokes and the 3 Stooges.

Personal aside – my brothers and I used to think our dad came up with the “Pull my finger.” joke. Fell off the coach laughing the first time I heard Bill Cosby do it.